Tuesday, June 12, 2012

States Are Ready for Hi-Tech Response to Hurricane Season


Full story posted on the Microsoft Corporate Citizenship blog

With the arrival of hurricane season in the Western Hemisphere, response organizations have also been diligently preparing to  ensure that they are ready to provide relief services.  Gulf-coast and Atlantic-coast U.S. States are standing ready, prepared with public communications campaigns, coordination tools, and emergency response teams trained and positioned to respond.

Part of these efforts include each coastal States’ participation in the National Donations Management Network (NDMN), a web-based solution for connecting the business community with emergency workers’ needs following a disaster. The States’ offices of emergency services, FEMA and the voluntary organizations active in disaster (VOADs) train throughout the year on how to use the NDMN website to effectively communicate to the business community what is needed most and how to review, accept and receive in-kind donation offers after a disaster. This investment in the NDMN program has paid off time and again over the last 5 years, enabling neighboring States to collaborate in their response. The service is provided by Aidmatrix, FEMA, the UPS Foundation and Accenture as a way of providing inter-State disaster communication tools to respond to the unpredictable nature of hurricane season.

Microsoft is working closely with the Aidmatrix Foundation, to support disaster response organizations through the use of information and communications technology.  As part of the partnership, Microsoft and the Aidmatrix Foundation work together to leverage, cloud-based technology to more quickly and cost-effectively scale online supply-chain management technologies, empowering more than 40,000 Aidmatrix partners to provide humanitarian relief worldwide.

For more information on how States are going hi-tech in their disaster preparedness, visit www.aidmatrix.org/relief-programs

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